This tiny little heifer was born a twin. The first born twin! The mother delivered her, licked her clean, nursed her once and then left her asleep in the field and wandered off to the other end and had another calf.
"Bella" which is what the girls decided to call her quickly became an orphan and us girls had the task of bottle feeding her night and morning. I was kind of excited to take on this chore!
Then one day, we had an unfortunate event take pace. One of our big bull calves got sick and within a couple hours died! His mother kept looking for him; it was obvious she missed having a calf. The solution: make her a foster mother to Bella!
So that is just what we did!
We used the oldest trick and the one that works best, which is to skin the cow's dead calf and put the hide over the calf to be grafted. The cow knows the smell of her own calf and this "smell bonding" is used to the advantage. We did however also use a commercial powder called O-NO-MORE. I am not absolutely sure what it does other than it looked like it tasted good to the cow so she wanted to lick her now "new" calf!
It's not always easy to convince a cow to take a calf that is not her own. The more you can do to trick her into thinking this is her own calf, the more likely you will succeed in fooling her.
Good thing Dirk is no amateur!
She went right to nursing on the first try!
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